A Call From The Opera

In late October 2011, I ran across this notice on the Bridge opportunity e-mail from New England Conservatory:

Art Songs for the 21st Century                  

Composer Competition & Cabaret Performance March 10th 2012,

Ethical Society of Philadelphia

Submit your composition! Deadline: December 9, 2011

The Center City Opera seeks to develop new relationships with composers. While many opera companies do this by examining orchestral music, this seems counter-intuitive to us. We are instead asking composers to submit two of their favorite art songs to us. What do art songs tell us? They tell us if you can write for the human voice. They show us that drama, wit, the balance of music and text, or melody are part of your aesthetic. While skill at orchestration is important, what happens between the music, text, and singer is, dare we say, more important. We will select a group of twelve composers and present two contrasting songs by each composer. We will take at least two composers and invite them to participate in our Creative Development Projects (CDP), a new work development program, possibly leading to production and/or commission on our mainstage. At least one composer selected for the CDP will be chosen by audience vote.

Submit pdfs, preferably with mp3s, of your songs to Andrew Kurtz, General & Artistic Director, Center City Opera Theater by December 9, 2011. Submissions should be via email: artsong@operatheater.org.

This notice intrigued me greatly, so I made an inquiry November 1^st  2011, asking if I could submit MIDI files of my songs without vocals.  I never heard back, so I thought “Oh well, another time…”  Imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail from Andrew Kurtz at 12:07 AM Saturday January 14, 2012 inviting me to make a submission, but I had to send it in by noon the same day!  Frankly, I didn’t get the e-mail until 10 AM and I didn’t have time to go to my computer store and scan individual .PDFs of 2 songs I wanted to make for the submission.  I sent complete song cycles scores with the MP3s and an explanation of the submission and a request for an extra day if they really need single song scores.  I can only hope the powers that be will be tolerant.

Does anyone think this is a really good sign that there was not a lot of submissions, or just a formality?